Slashdot Mirror
In Pursuit Of A Spammer
Kyle writes "Over at DSL Reports, We are currently pursuing a spammer from the West Palm Beach, Florida area. This wouldn't normally be news, but we think Slashdot readers may be interested in just how successful we have been. What's more interesting is that the spammer appears to be posting in the thread."
Well in some countries, spamming is clearly forbidden.
Don't you know it is now both immoral and criminal to think beyond the next quarterly report?
If we do, I hope it recounts the payback on Alan Ralsky, a fixature in /. lore.
When you don't have a leg to stand on, don't even get up.
he has an email newsletter. Let's all sign up!
Creationists are a lot like zombies. Slow, but powerful and numerous. And they all want to eat our brains.
Spam costs me money.
Are you using metered bandwidth? How much per kilobyte do you pay?
Every time I open an email I don't want, every time I have to update my anti-spam software (well, that's free but that's besides the point) it costs me time and money and I object.
Every time a neophyte friend or relative forwards a virus warning hoax to you, it costs you time and money, should that be illegal too?
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Does junk mail sent to your work or residential address through the standard postal service fall under this as well?
I receive more then my fair share of junk through the USPS, and I certainly can't put a strainer over my mailbox to filter any out.
How is this different?
Yes, sadly every time I go online it costs me money. Telecom NZ sells its badwidth dearly - 20 cents/MB when I exceed my limit (each month I get a whopping 1000MB to play with to my heart's content. Weehee!). It's not much but as the number of spam I get increases so do my costs. Directly. I'm not billing for my time to open them all, my electricity to power the PC or any other stuff.
It's not just spam, it's any unsolicited use of my bandwidth - and yes, viruses should be included too.
I am a leaf on the wind
Besides annoying the spammer in question, is there REALLY anything they can legally do to him? I doubt it. I have fought with spammers before, trying to get taken off of their lists, and they threatened ME with telling my ISP (a college at that time) that I was harassing HIM. I believe he would have done it, too. So I resigned myself to deleting hundreds of spams per week, and getting used to it. I can't wait until they make RIAA-style computer-nuking legal...we can all just start a computerized World War III.
As you may have seen, antispamcard.com recently spammed our forum.
They posted 2 messages to your forum. Is that what this whole story is about?
All they have done so far is make a lot of links from one site/organization to another. There has been no action against the spammer. They are not certain of his real name nor his address. I think its great that they're tracking him down, but I would not go so far as to say they have been successful.
Notably, the most fervent researcher on the forum (Ameritec Tech) has discovered that the spammer was violating several people's copyrights. One of those people has replied and stated they are taking legal action against the spammer immediately for the violation.
For to end yet again.
I've noticed a few "diplomats" grubbing for money recently on the kernel mailing list. Nigerian vacations, anyone? Oddly, each sender/IP occurs only *once*, it seems. Even more oddly, no mention of "Free Speech" (or any other policy) is made. It seems that "Free STFU" goes hand-in hand with "Free Speech", for practical purposes.
As opposed to legal ones.
C|N>K
Are you using metered bandwidth? How much per kilobyte do you pay?
Even on unmetered bandwidth, due you think that the ISP will soak up additional costs by cutting their salaries/profits? Chances are they will pass the increased costs onto the customer. And certainly, it won't be the spammer who pays.
Yes, but free speech is also somewhat limited. For instance, commercial speech can be regulated. Spam for the most part is commercial speech and thus should be put under the same regulations as any other advertisment.
.Robots file on their website or subscribe to a DoNotCall List, email is an invitation to ones home and the decision to allow it into your home should be yours to make and the gov't should be able to help one regulate this. If you are paying for something and others are invading its sancitity, you should be able to ask the gov't to help you out. If folks are not willing to respect this privacy before you have to say back off, the gov't should give you the ability to tell these guys to fuck off before they even get there.
That and freedom of speech is not something that is regulated by the gov't in someone elses home. It is limited to public properties. On private properties, you still have what ever limits of the freedom of speech that apply as well as those of the folks that regulate the private area.
By these two limits, email can and should be regulated. Much the same way one can place a
Again, freedom of speech is not an unlimited freedom. I'm sick of folks that think if it. If Taco wanted to edit my posts here on his site, its NOT infringing against my freedom of speech to do so...at least from a constitutional stand point.
blah
Most big time spammers go right around the "TOS" by becoming an ISP themselves.
/20 for a $4000 to $10,000, because they are going out of business.
Yes, but, unless they are becoming a tier 1 provider, they have to use an upstream provider, who probably have a TOS themselves, so no dice.
Believe me there are plenty of people who will sell you a
Well, as far as I know, you can't sell your ip blocks. You have to return it to the relevant provider/registry for re-assignement. Of course, just because they shouldn't doesn't mean they don't, but it's another point against them if it comes to litigation.
No sig
It's unfortunate that your comments were modded down to -1. Given the opportunity, I would have modded your statements Interesting even though I disagree with you.
This really drills down to the core issue of spam: money. Based upon what I've read on the subject, I (via my subscription fee) am subsidizing the cost of a spammer's business. I welcome any evidence that contradicts this, but until that time I would analogize your statement as follows: "It is their right to barge into your home and shove an ad in your face and it's your right to stop them....and by the way, this process will cost you $$."
That kind of thinking doesn't work because I can't legally put a bullet into a spammer's head. One's right to free speech ends at my doorstep. Any alternative interpretation of the First Amendment opens up a number of conflicts with the Fourth Amendment.
--K.
Sig: Bad people happen. Try to avoid being one of them.
Now you have the IPs, the URLs, the company names, etc.
So report these to every blackhole list available, report the hijacked material on the sites to the original publishers, check his providers for more spammers like him, and report the provider if necessary (so they start taking an active part in this as well) and get on to the next guy.
If ISPs began taking basic measures to block spam, refuse services to spammers, contact the providers of spammers, and blackhole domains, IP's, and networks that spam or encourage spammers, the spammers would eventually end up in a spammers ghetto of unscrupulous providers that could be easily blocked or filtered.
If it is left up to law enforcement and legislation, there will be loopholes as there are in the National Do-Not-Call Registry, and we will have opened up the door to congess regulating the use of email.
Read, L
...having served in the military for a significant period of time, when I saw the 'patriotic business statement' by Heckman I did a 'quick and dirty' search of some databases -no listing of a Brad or Bradley Heckman deployed as member of the U.S. Army during Operation Desert Shield or Desert Storm. Someone tell the #1 spam hunter at DSL report webpage to try and get a unit ID from Heckman? For some reason I can't post to that forum and I couldn't find an email address for the #1 spam hunter guy. The best way to sink a fraudulent business that preys on patriotic people is to show them he's a fraud.
"Just an idea".
-Anonymous Cowardly Good Guy
> Every time a neophyte friend or relative forwards a virus warning
> hoax to you, it costs you time and money, should that be illegal
> too?
In a word? Yes. That would be an unsolicited chain forward, i.e.,
a message that had already been forwarded to the forwarder and was
now, without request of the recipient, being forwarded again. There
is no valid reason ever to do that.
However, the reversed-charges argument for making spam illegal is,
as far as I'm concerned, the icing on the cake. The really strong
reasons why it should be illegal have to do with fraud and
harrassment.
Vanishingly close to 100% of spam is fraudulent, at least in terms
of forging headers. (Fraudulent content in the body is quite
common as well, but it's the headers primarily that concern me.)
Even if only non-fraudulent spam were legal, that would be a
tremendous improvement. Since the spammers would have to register
a fresh domain name in order to force me to update my filters, it
would not be ecconomically feasible to do that for each and every
message. I could prewash the spam out with a blacklist, saving
lots of CPU cycles for my bayesian classification system.
Now, the harrassment argument, which IMO is the truly rock-solid
one: if I got anything like anywhere near approaching close to
as many unsolicited phone calls per day from the same outfit,
and if they behaved in the same fashion (refused to identify
themselves, refused to stop contacting me), law enforcement
would be all over the case, and if they could track down the
people responsible, they would go to jail. That the contact
is by email rather than phone shouldn't matter: these creeps
should go to jail. There's one particular spamhaus in Asia
that I would pay good money to know who they are and be able
to shut them down, because they just won't leave me alone. I'm
tired of getting seventy messages a day from these cretins.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
Finally! A REAL use for image blogging. Screw getting him tons of junk mail. Lets make his private life as public as we can. Take pictures etc, and do press releases to all the big websites. CNN, MSNBC, etc. Lets see what happens when a lot of people, who may or may not be as technically sophisticated as the slashdot crowd....but suddenly know a lot about this guy, decide to do once they have easy access to his personal life.
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
We can filter by IPs or keywords or addresses or whatever, but they one thing they can never disguise is their message: it has to be available or they're just sending static. Part of that message has to be some way to contact the company, or else there's no way for you to order their penis enlargement cream or online marketing guide.
What we really need is an anti-spam program that searches identified spam for URLs, then scrapes those pages for forms and email addresses so that it can fill out the forms with junk and send a few hundred copies of their spam to the email addresses. That would effectively lower the signal-to-noise ratio in their order system to the point that it would be nearly useless.
Granted, though, such a system really would be the spam equivalent of WWIII. Right now half of all email traffic is spam, and with widespread use of the "Doomsday Filter" we'd probably have one third of traffic being spam and another third being anti-spam mail.
Obviously that wouldn't be good, so this is just meant as a theoretical counter-offensive. The important idea is that passive measures have been proven insufficient, and the only way to stop spam is going to be to cut off the demand for it. One way to do that is to direct the counterstrike at the message sender itself, rather than just the messenger. If your breast enhancement company's spammer gets shut down, you'll just hire another one. If the spam you're having sent results in tangible and direct problems for your business, you'll find other ways to advertise.
worked like a charm last time.
Please tell me the "SPAMMER" did more then post 2 messages in an forum which actually shares the same topic as his posts?
Or is it just enough that someone labeled him a "Spammer" that we have to "dump garbage on his lawn"?
Was it just an AD? IF this really was only about 2 posts in a FORUM, not emails, not anything else, something that the forum moderator could delete if requested, then this actually makes me sick.
I am unable to get to slashdot from my IP. I get on an open proxy and I'm able to get to slashdot. Banned? In God's name, why?
> Come on. Is it really that hard to download a mail content
> filter, or hit delete?
If you can even ask that question, it's obvious you don't get very
much spam.
Mail content filters, even the best ones (full bayesian classification
is at this time the best available) mostly don't work, or require
huge amounts of effort to "train" them and then still partly don't
work. As for hitting delete, if I get RSI that way, can I send you
my medical bills?
The fact that the contact method is email shouldn't matter: any
outfit that contacts you seventy times a day and refuses to identify
itself and refuses to stop, for _years_, is actively harrassing you.
That's criminal, and I want them incarcerated and jailed. If they
were using the phone instead of email, that's exactly what would
happen. No, telemarketers, though annoying, are not the same; we
get maybe five calls a day tops, and any given outfit never calls
us more than once a day, usually not that often. Spam pours in
continuously, every hour day and night. Additionally, you can
tell a telemarketer not to call you anymore and generally that
specific telemarketing firm will abide by that. If you try to ask
a spammer not to send you any more, they put you on their "lots
and lots of spam" list. (Yeah, I read the article about the
wealthy spammer who claimed to honor no-more-spam requests, but
even assuming she was telling the truth about that, she would be in
the minority.)
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
Filtering spam out of your inbox helps to make it more profitable for spammers. Anyone who is smart enough to filter spam is smart enough to ignore the products anway. Instead, route it into a holding bin, regex it for URLs and once or twice a day, download everything from those URLs to the bit bucket.
Get all your friends to do the same thing. Bandwidth costs spammers money, so make them pay for sending spam by using that bandwidth. They sent you are URL, so they can hardly complain if you take advantage of it.